The present subject matter relates generally to personalized, quantitative diet systems that operate in mass units, rather than energy units, to control a user's weight.
The obesity epidemic has systematically begun to erode the financial stability of the American health-care system. More than two-thirds of adults are now overweight, and at least one-third are considered obese (5% are morbidly obese). Obesity is linked with increasing incidence of heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, cancer and other afflictions.
Although many patients are willing to consult with a nutritionist on diet and exercise, the advice provided to these patients that they should “track calories in and calories out” is fundamentally flawed. Counting calories neglects basic physics principles because it misinterprets the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed. For example, consuming 2,000 calories of doughnuts, potato chips, beer, and candy is not equivalent to consuming 2,000 calories of healthy food. Although the energy content is the same, the body's fat storage and hormonal response is different.
By working in energy units, health care professionals assert that weight gain/loss is governed by simply subtracting the number of calories expended (or “burned”) from the number of calories that are ingested. This approach, which for generations has failed to produce consistent results, is flawed in at least four ways: (1) it neglects basic chemistry by ignoring the type of nutrients consumed; (2) it implicitly assumes that diet and exercise are independent variables; (3) it assumes that diet and exercise govern energy storage in the form of fat reserves, and not the other way around: in practice, hormones govern fat storage, which in turn influences diet and exercise; and (4) it ignores changes in basal metabolic rate over time.
The deeply-rooted and ingrained philosophy of working in energy units by tracking “calories in and calories out” pervades modern health care research. Worse yet, patients are often blamed for being lazy or lacking volition. Some are even convinced to undergo surgery such as liposuction, by-pass surgery, or the installation of a lap band. The reason why popular diets and fads do not work in the long run, and why so many patients fail to lose weight, is that balancing energy in-take with energy output (activity level) neglects the complex network of chemical reactions that govern the fat storage and fat dissociation mechanisms.
Conventionally, smart watches and other health tracking technologies have become popular in an effort to promote more active lifestyles. Most devices use accelerometers to track the number of “steps” recorded throughout the day or during a given exercise regimen. The results are then converted into calories that have been “burned.” However, accelerometer data does not lend itself to easy interpretation of expenditure when a user is biking, lifting weights, rowing, doing push-ups, doing sit-ups, shoveling snow, or performing any of the multitude of other activities that individuals may perform throughout a given day. Accelerometers are also known to produce false-positive signals, e.g. when the user experiences a bumpy commute to work or cuts the grass with a riding lawn mower that vibrates.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system that: (1) reliably tracks all forms of exercise irrespective of the type of activity; and (2) generates a customized diet plan for an individual based on personalized data from the user, thereby overcoming the disadvantages of conventional systems.